Test of Loyalty
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Test of Loyalty" FOR THE SERIOUS READER will prove incomprehensible; nonetheless I recommend it—I recommend it as an artifact of the age. The book is incomprehensible because Peter Schrag, though...
...What bothers me with this judgment is, as with so many of Mr...
...The result is—well, the result is I suppose the New Journalism or some such thing, for from every mixed-up page there arises a whiff of baloney...
...Such preposterous fads along with his political, cultural, and religious enthusiasms are almost all dictated to him by hucksters...
...Schrag's judgments, that I have no idea what the author means...
...Intellectualoids will eagerly swallow the quack sociology, quack history, and quack psychology that oozes through Test of Loyalty...
...But such a pedestrian tale is not enough for the ambitious Mr...
...It will be written more cautiously and more objectively, though possibly it will remark on the abundant ironies of this sad episode...
...Of course Mr...
...And they do not blink when they encounter an author misusing words like "ideology" (p...
...Think of it, while defenders of the law were attempting to preserve that law by breaking it, Dr...
...Schrag is not writing for you and me...
...He is writing for a rising class of people whose lives are filled with arcane fantasies, and that is why I commend the book to you...
...Indeed for them these misemployed words are catnip neologisms...
...He is absolutely incapable of clearly stating his appreciation of a subject and his reasons for that appreciation...
...Test of Loyalty is supposed to be about the trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo...
...We all really ought to know more about Mr...
...Such a book will keep its subject in focus, document facts and judgments, and not pretend to be quite so arty...
...further, I cannot see what his statement has to do with the Ellsberg verdict...
...For instance, despite his aforementioned disrelish for America's "becoming increasingly European," whenever he approaches things American he reflexively holds his nose...
...Schrag rarely pauses to explain what he means...
...They are easily conversant with the conspiracy theories which Mr...
...Ellsberg's well-publicized season in Gethsemane, and he allows his readers to see all of this as it filters through his own stupendously sensitive spirit...
...Schrag has lifted from the Hate America crowd...
...on and on, until he arrives at this curious, though perfectly characteristic, judgment, which he smuggles into a chapter ostensibly dealing with the trial's verdict: "For a generation the country [America] had become increasingly European, particularly in its conduct of foreign policy...
...Sc:hrag in almost four hundred pages of delirium expatiates over the stultification of postwar liberalism, the perils of bureaucracy, the classification of documents, the First Amendment, the Nixon gang, political commitment, civil disobedience, virtue, California...
...The book that misuses them frequently enough is guaranteed to enchant them...
...He prefers book reviews to books, newspapers to journals, and he chooses television documentaries and news stories over all of the above...
...Forgoing either the simple chronicling of an historical event (not one footnote appears) or the forthright polemicizing of a political or moral position, Mr...
...FOR THE SERIOUS READER Test of Loyalty will prove incomprehensible...
...Today he buys recycled clothing and edible calendars...
...Schrag is being so provocative it might be helpful to us if he would explain himself...
...Still, as I say, Test of Loyalty has my blue ribbon of commendation...
...Ellsberg was portraying himself as a proud exemplar of civil disobedience even as his corps of lawyers, public relations men, and Hollywood eminentoes were spending seventy thousand dollars a month professing his legal innocence—an enormous fraud by all hands...
...Test of Loyalty is such a book, incondite and barely intelligible to the serious reader but prodigious fuel for the intellectualoids' fantasies...
...The cause of this sally into belles lettres was our author's exposure to a random collection of innocent Californians being screened for jury duty...
...Ellsberg absconding with the Pentagon Papers, frequenting Xerox machines, and attempting to distribute their infamous fruits to various statesmen and newspapers...
...It gives us glimpses of Dr...
...Rather than stating his case, he lets fly with stuff like: "When they first entered the courtroom, they looked like a couple of busloads of tourists from Indianapolis who had lost their way to Disneyland: white, middle aged, old-aged, pinch-faced, obeisance-repressing-anger, the last revenge of the Puritan in America...
...His disposable income is almost totally exhausted on the intellectualized brummagem of the times...
...This makes it difficult for the intelligent reader to comprehend what it is that the author is getting at...
...He writes for America's New Age, and because he writes for the kind of people he writes for, he must attempt much more than merely chronicling an important historical episode...
...Schrag's occasional spells of reportage are lucid though brief...
...Schrag must instruct his readers on all the sundry conditions and issues tangential to Mr...
...The book is a stunning achievement...
...They are people who harbor vast pretensions to intellectual grandeur, though their intellectual accomplishments are so puny they are properly designated intellectualoids...
...The book is incomprehensible because Peter Schrag, though discussing matters of great moment, has the analytical prowess of a teenage poetess and the literary style of a rhinoceros...
...Schrag maunders on, pausing now to report on Ellsberg's latest action and then lurching forward with his sensitive perceptions, historical judgments, moral instructions, and ominous prophecies...
...He is a religious follower of National Public Radio, and he believes educational television sharpens the mind...
...Yesterday he was living on seeds, nuts, and wheat germ...
...But first let me tell you what the book is about or what the book is supposed to be about, for one of the author's problems is that he tries to write several kinds of books on several different subjects simultaneously...
...Schrag outdistanced them all...
...Schrag's judgments are turgid, wrong, and offensive to anyone who finds America something other than a personal embarrassment...
...Test of Loyalty is a fitting recipient of the Saturday Evening Club's Harold Robbins Award for the Year's Worst Book...
...Now my fundamental problem with this asseveration is not whether Mr...
...Schrag's audience...
...Unfortunately Mr...
...1974 was no lean year for trashy books, but Mr...
...And his critical style is wholly dependent on rhetorical smirks and frowns...
...There is rising up in America a class of semi-educated individuals whose casual encounters with education have left them with cosmopolitan tastes, invidious conclusions, and intense theoretical commitments...
...So it is that Mr...
...Schrag is right or whether he is wrong...
...The intellectualoid speaks condescendingly to almost everyone he encounters, though his knowledge of the world is thickly interlarded with superstition and error...
...I have only -a general idea as to why he finds all of the above characteristics so malodorous, but I do not think he leaves any doubt that he does and I think that while Mr...
...They have recently fanned out into all sectors of American life, and some have risen to prominence...
...159) and "surrealism" (passim...
...It also gives us glimpses of our government frantically attempting to scotch publication of the Papers, and it gives us a glance at the serious legal debate that ensued...
...Of course, a useful history of the Ellsberg trial remains to be written...
...Schrag extends to us no such courtesies because Mr...
Vol. 8 • January 1975 • No. 4
